Ghost Month (31 page)

I picked up the papers and flipped through them. “Looks like she planted a bug in his car! Did Ah-ding chew betel nut?”

“He did,” said Nancy, her voice dead. “He went to Hsinchu City a lot, too, of course. Ah-ding had a few plants out there.”

“He must have stopped at Julia’s betel-nut stand at some point, and that must have been when she bugged his car.”

Nancy stared into my eyes. “What was she doing in his car?!”

“Nancy, she probably didn’t have to get into his car to bug it! She probably dropped something when she handed him the bag of chews.”

She sighed and looked visibly relieved. “Do you know how weird it would be if Julia and Ah-ding had slept together?”

“Please,” I said. “I don’t want to imagine that.”

On my way to work, I had a hard time visualizing anything but Julia with a tag team of repulsive older men with reddened teeth.

D
WAYNE WAS IN A
bad mood when I finally showed up just a little later than usual at Unknown Pleasures.

“You didn’t call, you didn’t text,” he grumbled. “I was thinking maybe you were hopelessly tied up … between that girl’s legs.”

“I can get out of any hold,” I said as I hastily washed my hands. “I get a lot of practice here.”

“Yeah, but I don’t grab you the same way she grabs you. Right?”

“Gentlemen,” admonished Frankie with as much disgust as possible. We swung into position and got to work.

It was a busy night, but not exceptionally so. When I was coming back from the common bathroom, I saw two teenaged boys break away from my moped, trying to stifle laughter. All right, maybe it was the oldest, worst-looking vehicle in the night market, but I’m stubborn, and the flagrant mockery made me even more determined to keep riding it.

Kuilan came over to chat and brought over a bowl of noodles
with one of her new fried-chicken fillets on the side. I thought they were okay. She was touting and shouting about her new organic chicken, but they didn’t taste any better than Kentucky Fried Chicken. In fact, the current specimen in the glassine bag in my hand was too heavily seasoned with chili powder. Eating it was like licking the sun.

“Jing-nan, did you hear?” said Kuilan. “There’s a rumor that the big move is back on!”

I crossed my legs.

“Are you sure, Kuilan?”

“It’s those lousy developers trying to push us out again. They make all of us mainlanders look bad! I’ve seen them walking through the market with their money buddies from China, checking the sightlines and drawing up the blueprints in their minds.” She gestured all around before thumping her fist on her chest. “They don’t even see us or our stands.”

I took another bite of Kuilan’s fiery cutlet and wiped away tears as I chewed.

“Nothing’s been announced, though, right?” I struggled to ask. I picked up the bowl of noodles and eagerly drank the pickled soup.

“You know how it works, Jing-nan.” Kuilan propped up a foot on the side of my front grill and counted off points on her fingers, taut with patches of healed skin. “They’re going to finalize the deals first behind closed doors. Then they announce that they are examining the idea and want to involve the community. The land’s probably already been sold and the construction bids already accepted.” She closed her hand and shook her scarred fist at me. I drank some more soup to clear my mouth, but it only spread the spicy heat around. “Kuilan,” I said, “we can sue them and tie everything up in court. There are a lot of ways to fight this thing if we want to.”

Listen to me. Acting all tough even though I had an out with Peggy Lee’s company, if I wanted it. I was the new Mr. Huang.

Noticing my watering eyes, Kuilan gasped, “You really do care, Jing-nan! Your parents would have been so proud of you!” She rubbed my arm and went back to her stand.

We sold a broad range of grilled and fried meats, but we didn’t
sell fried-chicken fillets, and I felt self-conscious about having it on my breath. I swished my mouth a few times with Coke to get rid of the taste. When I wasn’t looking, Dwayne grabbed my bottle and chugged it.

“Gan ni niang!”
I yelled and slapped his back.

“Watch your mouth!” Frankie said, uncharacteristically loud. “There are kids here.”

“Then they’re out too late.”

A big anime convention was underway, and a platoon of Japanese attendees made their way to the night market from the Taipei International Convention Center. They were easy pickings for the stands that had barkers fluent in Japanese. That wasn’t the case for Unknown Pleasures, but a lot of Japanese came over because they were Joy Division fans. I always made sure to give them a little extra, and they struggled through English to talk about their favorite songs.

One dude, who was dressed up as a character from the world of
Final Fantasy
, tucked his plastic sword under his left armpit as he showed me pictures of his Joy Division vinyl collection on his phone. He had two copies of their first record, the four-song
An Ideal for Living
EP, and close-up pictures of the matrix numbers scratched in the inner grooves to prove they were genuine.

I couldn’t help but shake my head at the Hitler Youth drummer on the cover and the inside sleeve picture of the Nazi soldier pointing a gun at a Jewish boy. Joy Division had taken their name from a fictionalized account of brothels at concentration camps that operated for the pleasure of Nazi officers.

What a bunch of stupid punks, flaunting Nazi imagery only to offend people. Isn’t it embarrassing to be confronted with the dumb ideas you had in your youth?

I resolved right then to retire my T-shirt of the Hitler Youth drummer. I couldn’t justify wearing it anymore, even if it was the cover of a Joy Division record.

A
T THE END OF
the night, I counted up the money and was surprised by the amount of cash. We had done better than I thought. I paid out Dwayne and Frankie and said good night.

As I was going over to my moped, Ah-tien, Kuilan’s son, caught up with me.

“Hey, Jing-nan?” He tried smiling but looked extremely apprehensive and couldn’t stop rubbing the back of his neck.

“Hi, Ah-tien.” I had my helmet in my hands.

“Why don’t we hang out a little bit tonight?”

“I kinda just want to go home now.”

He gave a fake laugh, which required an incredible amount of effort on his part. “If you stay here a little longer,” he said through gritted teeth, “we can sit at one of the late stalls together. I know a good place for congealed pig blood in hot pots.”

“Some other time, I promise,” I said.

Suddenly angry, Ah-tien spat out, “Then go ahead! See if I care!” He stomped off.

Wow, that was really weird, I thought to myself. Maybe he’d always felt bad that we weren’t friends and was trying to bridge that gap. I should have met him halfway.

Honestly, though, I’d never liked him or his negative energy, and I was all right with the way things stood now. We didn’t need to be buddies.

J
UST OVER THE FIRST
bridge, my back wheel started to make a lot of noise. Before I could pull over, my bike fishtailed. I managed to jump off before it leapt out from under me, the rear wheel popping off its axle. I tried to land on my feet but only succeeded in tumbling into a forward roll.

Miraculously, my only injury was a scratched-up right palm. I made a fist to make sure none of the bones were broken. My phone was okay, too.

I looked over the wreck. I was too shocked from my tumble to feel anger or disappointment and had only pragmatic thoughts. I resolved to move all the parts over to the shoulder and walk home.

I suddenly noticed a small circle of white light that seemed to fall upon me. It opened up and bathed my entire body. My arms and legs disappeared in the thick milk. Then I couldn’t see anymore.

Oh my God. I had died in that accident. Now I was a ghost. I
teetered on my feet. I could feel the ground begin to rumble. Was my soul about to be judged?

From out of nowhere, a large pickup truck, painted black as night, pulled up to me and turned off its high beams. A man got out of the passenger side of the cab.

“When are you going to realize that I’m on your side, Jing-nan?” said the Taiwanese-American. “You didn’t call me, and you never answered any of my emails.”

“I didn’t know it was you,” I said. “I don’t know if I would have answered if I did.”

He cocked his head, and I think he smiled. “Did you hit your head, Jing-nan?”

“No.”

“Come here. Let’s put your bike in the bed. We can sit there, too.” I didn’t trust him, but I didn’t have much of a choice, either. Even if Nancy were awake, it would take too long for her to come by and scrape my carcass off the road. I looked at my dirty knees and my right palm, which I noticed had sprung a small rivulet of blood.

“So you had those little punk kids mess up my bike,” I said. “Too bad they didn’t finish the job. I’m still alive.”

“Actually, they executed it perfectly. We figured the wheel would fall off right around here. And that piece of shit doesn’t go fast enough for you to get seriously hurt, anyway.”

The road wasn’t completely deserted. I made sure that the several cars rubbernecking got a good look at my face in case the American tried to disappear me. I was tired, sweaty and thirsty.

“Could you give me a hand here?” I asked.

Another man popped out of the cab. It was the Taiwanese guy with bad skin who had dropped me in the elevator. “Jing-nan,” he said, slapping my back. “Sorry about that thing before.” I went to one end of the moped, but the Taiwanese said, “Let me grab that.” He lifted the moped onto the truck’s bed by himself.

I went back for the loose wheel, expecting both guys to get back in the cab, but the American remained in the truck bed. He really did want to sit with me.

The truck bed had seats built in against the back panel of the
cab. I sat down and noticed circular scrape marks around a grommet in the floor for another seat, or maybe a mounted gun. We snapped on seat belts.

The American tapped the roof of the cab and we pulled out onto the road. He eased back in his seat and lit up a cigarette. After a few puffs, he spat over the side. He crossed his right leg over his left knee and folded his arms behind his head, as if we were in his living room, which happened to be in a mild wind tunnel.

“You must be a contractor with some American agency,” I told him. I wanted to say “the CIA,” but that could escalate things quickly. “You should be in Iraq.”

“Jing-nan, the less you know, the better.” He took a quick drag on his cigarette. The annoyed look on his face told me I had hit at least a partial truth. “I’ve been trying to elbow you out, but you keep coming back in, like one of those tropical bugs that won’t stay squashed.”

“I could call the cops on you for what you did to me.”

A thoughtful look came over his face, and he wiped his chin and mouth. “Don’t you have enough trouble with the police?” He chuckled and flicked his cigarette over the side, sending glowing ashes into the wind. I looked at my scraped hand and brushed gravel bits off of it.

In English he said, “You gotta learn to be more careful, Jing-nan.”

I said back in English, “Are you taking me home?”

“We will, but I want to show you something first.”

“Are you sure you’re not going to shoot me and dump my body someplace?”

“There are people who want you dead, Jing-nan. They think you’re out to fuck up their operation. But I see you as you really are: a little lovesick bastard hung up on his old girl. I get you, because I know some other guys like that.”

The Taiwanese driver turned onto National Highway One, heading east toward Keelung.

“You know that I’m an ABC. I’m here on American business.” Behind his face a steady stream of silhouettes of shacks and factories went by, an animated story of Taiwan’s too-rapid industrialization.

“What kind of American business are you on?” I asked.

“We work best with nondemocratic governments. More stable than governments subject to free elections. That wasn’t a problem for most of Taiwan’s history. Now that you allow political candidates from all these dissident political parties, and they actually win elections, we’ve had to partner with, uh, nongovernmental agencies that are more stable and discreet.”

A series of double-trailer trucks driving away from Keelung groaned by in the opposite lane.

“Nongovernmental agencies?” I asked.

“Organized criminal groups, Jing-nan. There are gangs here that are three times as old as Taiwan’s democracy—gangs that were formed by mainlanders after the Chinese Civil War.”

I wanted to know how he fit into all of this. After all, ABCs could join these gangs, as well. “Are you a criminal?” I asked.

He folded his arms and licked his lips. “I handle the relationship with the gangs, Jing-nan, but I’m not a gangster, and I can’t control everything they do. The whole Julia thing they’re handling in their own way. She was an innocent bystander caught up in an intragang power struggle, but her death was not in vain.” He rolled his cigarette between his thumb and middle finger and regarded it clinically before tossing it aside. “They’re taking care of the guilty parties their way. I don’t have anything to do with it, and neither does America.”

I felt my throat lock up, but I managed to chirp, “Who killed Julia?”

“Specifically, I don’t know and I’ve never asked. I told you. It was friction within Black Sea, but everything’s all right now, or will be soon.”

“Black Sea, huh?”

“Oh, fuck. You better just forget I said that.”

I interlocked my fingers and pounded my hands against my knees. “I was gonna marry her, you know?”

“Let me guess. You were also going to have two cars, a suburban mansion and two kids going to the Ivy Leagues?” The American laughed out loud before composing himself. To show that he was serious, he switched back to speaking Mandarin. “You’re talking crazy, Jing-nan! Look at you! Look at what you do! Look at where
you live! I don’t want to make fun of you, but take a good look at who you are!”

Both of us leaned into a turn. We were now headed south on Fuxing North Road. We went into a tunnel, and engine sounds echoed around us like lost souls. We came out and whipped through Zhongshan District. Construction barriers narrowed the road, and we were probably driving too fast. Our wheels pounded metal plates set in the asphalt to the one-two beat of Joy Division’s “Isolation.”